Of all the disgraceful rulings the US Supreme Court has made in its 227-year history — and the lowlight reel is fairly lengthy — the decision in Buck v Bell still stands out as one of the ugliest. The case may not be as well known as, for instance, Dred Scott v Sandford, which denied African-Americans citizenship. But in just five paragraphs, the court upheld a statute that enabled the state of Virginia to sterilize “mental defectives” — specifically one Carrie Buck, a young resident of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
The year was 1927. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote the 8-1 majority opinion. The penultimate paragraph concludes with one of the most notorious epigrams of American law: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Yet as Adam Cohen, a former editorial board member at The New York Times and the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, points out, there were a number of problems with this decision quite apart from its manifest inhumanity.
To begin: Buck was neither epileptic nor feebleminded. As time would prove, she was of perfectly average intelligence. She was simply uneducated and luckless — a poor white girl from Charlottesville who’d had a baby at 17, most likely because she’d been raped by the nephew of her foster mother. Rather than risking scandal, her guardians thought it best to get rid of her.
Even by her doctors’ coldblooded calculus, Buck was only a “middle grade moron.” As medieval as that sounds, it was a genuine taxonomic distinction developed by psychologist Henry Goddard, whose pyramid of feeblemindedness featured “idiots” at the bottom, “imbeciles” in the middle and higher-functioning “morons” at the top.
Nor was Buck part of three generations of so-called imbeciles. Her mother, Emma, was committed to the same colony as her daughter a few years earlier without being administered an intelligence test. And her daughter, Vivian, was barely 8 months old when a Red Cross social worker decided she was “deficient,” explaining to a lower court that the baby had “a look about it that is not quite normal.”
None of this mattered. At the time of Buck’s institutionalization, the US was swept up in a mania for eugenics. Part of the obsession was driven by xenophobia: Nativists feared that the sudden influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe would make thin gruel of hearty American stock.
But the movement, because of its supposed reliance on science to improve society, also found champions in the progressive and intellectual elite, including Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt.
And eugenics was of particularly keen interest to doctors, including Albert Priddy, superintendent of Buck’s institution. “He saw it as the best way to rid the world of the sort of patients he spent all of his days ministering to,” Cohen explains. His patients, in his view, were miserable — and a future burden on the state, sure to lead to an uncontainable problem of “pauperism and criminality.”
Of all the tools to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, sterilization was by far the most efficient. During the Progressive Era, a number of states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, including California and Connecticut. So bullish was Priddy to do the same for Virginia that he worked in concert with a methodical, meticulous local lawmaker, Aubrey Strode, to design a statute that would withstand the test of the highest court of the land. Buck was the test case.
“There was only one problem,” Cohen writes. “Carrie had no idea what was going on.”
An unsuspecting innocent, an ambitious country doctor, a nation briefly infatuated with a despicable ideology — these would all seem to be the elements of a captivating narrative. Yet “Imbeciles” is often a boggy read, and a disorganized one at that. Cohen, now a senior writer at Time magazine, repeats himself early and often, which suggests that the basic outline of a propulsive story eluded him. (Strange, given that he’s written brisk, readable narratives before, including “Nothing to Fear” and “The Perfect Store.”) He takes the reader down a couple of biographical sinkholes, giving us pages of back stories when a simple paragraph would have done the trick.
Most crucially, he writes as if he’s retrying Buck v Bell. But we already know the decision was an egregious miscarriage of justice — it was the unenlightened product of an unenlightened time. And the case itself was unsuspenseful. The fix was in from the start.
We learn early on that Buck’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, had close personal and professional ties to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded — the superintendent paid his legal fees — which meant he made no efforts to mount a serious defense for his client. He never called on Buck’s teachers to confirm that she’d acquitted herself well in school; more fundamentally, he never asked Buck to testify on her own behalf. His petitions for appeals were always brief and incomplete, making insufficient use of precedent.
“He was an impostor,” Cohen writes.
What this means, from the reader’s point of view, is that although the courtroom scenes involving Whitehead are tragic, they are utterly devoid of drama.
By the time the case made its way to the desk of Holmes, himself an eager eugenicist, readers are hardly surprised by his chilling opinion. Nor are they surprised that his Supreme Court colleagues, many of them enthusiastic race purists, overwhelmingly sided with him.
Cohen repeatedly denounces the decision: Holmes could have “probed the factual record” to determine whether Buck was feebleminded; he could have looked at the expanding literature of the biological sciences, which had begun to challenge the basic assumptions of eugenics; he could have thought through the psychological consequences of sterilization for a young woman like Buck.
All of which is true. But Cohen, a Harvard Law School graduate, surely knows that Supreme Court justices aren’t in the habit of scouring the record for facts they were never presented. It’s simply not part of their job.
What I wish Cohen had done was spend more time on the American obsession with the feebleminded — which is by far the richest, most fascinating, most horrifying aspect of his book — and less time in the courtroom. Our research on eugenics was so sophisticated that we became the envy of the Germans; our Immigration Act of 1924 earned praise from no less than Hitler in Mein Kampf.
In his introduction to Imbeciles, Cohen says Buck v Bell “is little remembered today.” But that’s not true, really: Mention the case at a midsize cocktail party of lawyers, and many will come back with “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” But ask whether they know that Hitler praised our state sterilization laws — now that, to most of them, would be news.
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